SHREVEPORT, La. — It’s a conversation any father and son might have — a quick chat about baseball, families and world affairs. But when the speakers are President George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, even a seemingly innocuous conversation can suddenly carry great weight, especially when Oliver Stone is at the controls.

With sweat cascading down his face on a steamy summer night, the Oscar-winning director is directing James Cromwell (playing the elder Bush) and Josh Brolin (starring as President Bush) through a critical moment in “W.,” Stone’s potentially divisive drama about the personal, political and psychological evolution of the current president.

Although the father-son patter is ostensibly friendly, the subtext is anything but, hinting at the intricate parent-child relationship that Stone believes helps to explain George W. Bush’s ascension.

While the Bushes in this scene from 1990 are talking about the Texas Rangers (of whom George W. once owned a share) and Saddam Hussein (against whom George H.W. was about to go to war in Kuwait), there is much more at stake, as Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser saw the fictional conversation unfolding.

“You need to back him down and take him out — like you did Noriega,” George W. tells his father about Saddam. The elder Bush isn’t sure he was going to be that rash.

“You know I’ve always believed in leaving personal feelings out of politics,” the 41st president tells his son. “But Saddam “… this aggression cannot stand. Not gonna allow this little dictator to control 25 percent of the world’s oil.”

As the architect of the outspoken dramas “Platoon,” “Salvador,” “Wall Street,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “JFK,” Stone stands apart as one of the most openly political filmmakers in a business where it’s usually the actors who wear their beliefs on their sleeves. A longtime backer of Democratic candidates (recent donations include a gift to Sen. Barack Obama), Stone is either the oddest person to chronicle the life of the current president or the most inspired.

Whatever the verdict, the marriage of director and subject has left nearly as many people running for the sidelines as wanting to be a part of the director’s undertaking.

Indeed, “W.’s” combination of story and filmmaker and the poor track record of recent biographical movies scared off at least three potential studio distributors and any number of actors, including, initially, star Brolin, and even Major League Baseball, which declined to cooperate with the production.

Yet as Stone guides Cromwell and Brolin across Shreveport’s Independence Bowl stadium, doubling for the Rangers’ home field, it was possible to see that “W.” could be, in a complicated way, sympathetic.

The father is belittling a son, George H.W. cautioning George W. to stick to simple things: “Maybe better you stay out of the barrel,” the senior Bush tells his son, and leave the family’s political legacy to younger brother Jeb.

“Well, son, I’ve got to say I was wrong about you not being good at baseball,” the father ultimately says, tossing him a scrap of a compliment.

The future president doesn’t quite get what the reproving “barrel” idiom means, but he realizes his father doesn’t respect him. Brolin takes in the snub, but then his bearing grows determined: George W. would have to prove himself beyond anyone’s imagining.

Stone says it’s part of what drove the younger Bush into the White House: to show his doubters wrong. “Someone who could step into that path and out-father his father,” the 61-year-old director suggests.

“I love Michael Moore, but I didn’t want to make that kind of movie,” he says of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” This film “isn’t an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It’s a Shakespearean story. I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.”

Stone, Brolin and the filmmaking team believe they are crafting a biography so honest that loyal Republicans and the Bushes themselves might see it. Given Stone’s filmmaking history, coupled with a sneak peek at an early “W.” screenplay draft, that prediction looks like wishful thinking.

Still, it’s a captivating challenge: Can a provocateur become fair and balanced? And if Stone is, in some way, muzzling himself to craft a mass-appeal movie, has he cast aside one of his best selling points?

Brolin has spent countless hours studying the president’s speech patterns and body language but says he wasn’t trying to concoct a spitting-image impression, which ran the potential of becoming a “Saturday Night Live” caricature.

“It’s not for me to get the voice down perfectly,” the 40-year-old Brolin says, even though he came close. More important, the actor suggests, was to unearth Bush’s inner voice: “Where is my place in this world? How do I get remembered?”

“Republicans can look at it and say, ‘This is why I like this guy,’ ” he contends. “It’s not a political movie. It’s a biography. People will remember that this guy is human, when we are always (outside of the movie) dehumanizing him, calling him an idiot, a puppet, a failed president. We want to know in the movie: How does a guy grow up and become the person that he did?”

Stone, who was briefly a Yale classmate of Bush, is clearly no fan of the president’s politics but says he’s amazed by the man’s resilience and ambition.

The movie is basically divided into three acts: Bush’s hard-living youth, his personal and religious conversion, and finally his first term in the Oval Office.

“He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people,” Stone says. What further fascinates the director is Bush’s religious and personal conversion: a hard-drinking C student who was able to become not only Texas governor but also the leader of the Free World.

“We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it’s never meant to demean him,” Stone says.

“You put the two names together — Bush and Stone — and everybody had a preconceived notion of what the film would be. But look at “World Trade Center,”’ “W.” producer Moritz Borman says of Stone’s commercially successful 2006 movie about two Port Authority policemen rescued from Sept. 11 rubble.

“There was an uproar when it was announced and then, when the movie got closer to release, the very people who protested it preached from the pulpit that it was a film that had to be seen.”

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